Comic-Con 2018: The movement to protect cosplayers from harassment in a #MeToo world

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Cosplayers pose for a photo during the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con International. (File Photo by Kevin Sullivan, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Ivy Doomkitty is a professional cosplayer who travels the world portraying several different characters. (Courtesy afreemanphotography.com)

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The floor was filled with vendors, exhibits and fans at the Comic Con Revolution in 2017. (Photo courtesy of Comic Con Revolution).

Cosplayers, including this woman dressed as Dark Helmet from “Spaceballs,” were everywhere during the first day of Comic-Con 2016 at the San Diego Convention Center on Thursday. Day 1 of the 2016 Comic-Con at the San Diego Convention Center. (Staff photo by Kevin Sullivan/Orange County Register, SCNG)

Fans came dressed as Austin Powers during Day 2 of the 2016 Comic-Con at the San Diego Convention Center on Friday. (File photo by Kevin Sullivan)

Ivy Doomkitty is a professional cosplayer, which means she spends a lot of time wearing costumes in public.

As a cosplayer (someone who dresses up as fictional characters), she portrays pop culture figures from her classic take on Wonder Woman to an Ewok-Playboy Bunny mashup, from an elaborate Bowser of the Super Mario Brothers universe to a Jessica Rabbit pin-up model.

Except, that is, for those unfortunate moments that all too many cosplayers experience of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior, the kind of pervasive conduct that launched such hashtag-propelled movements as #CosplayIsNotConsent five or six years ago, years before the rise of 2017’s #MeToo rallying cry.

“I’ve had incidents where people have grabbed my butt or women have grabbed my boob like it’s no big deal,” Doomkitty says. “As it happens, you’re shocked – your brain is still trying to process what happened. And by the time you realize what happened, that person is gone.

“I freeze, but I’m always surrounded by friends who catch that very quickly and say something to them,” she says. “And if it gets really serious, that person gets reported and gets ejected.”

That’s the best outcome – the community policing itself, and if necessary, getting security to kick offenders out of the convention – and while more and more conventions are taking strong, proactive steps to ensure the safety of cosplayers and all attendees, there’s still room to improve.

“I think that definitely there’s been a change in con culture,” says Kate Gardner, an assistant editor based in Los Angeles for The Mary Sue, an online site that covers pop culture from a feminist perspective. “I think the outright sexual harassment – a lot of cons are stepping up and as a result, there’s some action being taken.

“But we’re still far away from where it’s going to be perfect, which is why we need to continue to bring it to the forefront,” she says.

Conventions for fans of pop culture have long been central to the world of cosplay, giving fans of any slice of the geek and nerd universe a chance to dress up as characters from movies and television, manga and anime, video games and anything else a fun and fertile imagination might dream up.

But for years there’s been a dark side to what should be only happiness and light. Countless women, and some men too, have stories of being grabbed and groped, photographs taken up skirts or down cleavage, and crude, inappropriate comments of all kinds. So prevalent has this become over time that the phrase “creeping at a con” was coined to describe it.

About five years ago, though, things started to change. The slogan “Cosplay is not consent” started to spread, and groups such as Geeks For CONsent formed to push for stronger policies to protect convention goers.

Rochelle Keyhan, one of the founders of Geeks For CONsent, says it grew out of an anti-street harassment program she and the other founders launched in Philadelphia, where the Irvine native was working as a prosecutor specializing in gender-based violence at the time. They created a comic book to address the issue, took it to a comic convention in that city, and were stunned by what they heard from people there.

“The stories that we were hearing from the cosplayers were so graphically sexual,” Keyhan says. “It was just so much more intense and scary.

“The people who were doing the harassment (were) sexualizing the character the person was cosplaying, and then forgetting that that person playing the character was also a human,” she says.

In 2014, Geeks For CONsent decided to push for stronger protective measures at San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic-Con, two of the biggest in the world.

“They were the unfortunate recipient of the first wave of public awareness,” Keyhan says of the San Diego event. A petition was launched asking San Diego Comic-Con to strengthen its code of conduct policy, increase anti-harassment signage and information, and train volunteers to handle complaints, which the convention operators declined to do. “Luckily, the geek community is sort of social-justice activist anyway, and they didn’t accept that,” she says.

A guerrilla public relations campaign during San Diego Comic-Con that summer of 2014 kept the pressure on, and soon after New York Comic-Con convened a panel that led to the establishment of strong anti-harassment guidelines that included detailed descriptions of unacceptable behavior and a way to report harassment within the NYCC app that included GPS to help convention volunteers quickly find targets of harassment.

“After that, we got messages from conventions across the world asking us to either vet their policy or tweeting their policies at us so we were aware they had one,” says Keyhan, who cosplays at Hermione Granger and Bellatrix Lestrange, both characters from the Harry Potter canon.

Keyhan, like many others, still hopes San Diego Comic-Con will strengthen its policies in time, but convention officials have consistently said they believe their guidelines cover any problems that might emerge.

“Our Code of Conduct was intentionally created to serve as a comprehensive measure that makes attendee safety a priority,” the statement read in part. “We want all participants to feel if they are treated in a manner that makes them uncomfortable, that there is a system in place that will respond to misconduct and sexual harassment. We do not provide specifics ofour implementation of security measures to ensure the safety of our attendees.”

Doomkitty says she believes the world of conventions has become more welcoming in recent years, whether it’s a greater openness and acceptance for fans of all backgrounds – she’s a well-known advocate for body-type, gender- and ethnic diversity in cosplay – or the kinds of harassment that sparked the Cosplay is Not Consent movement.

“When I started cosplay, there was nobody who represented me, a bigger girl who was a person of color, and that’s why I created those panels,” says Doomkitty, who will host a panel, Cospositive: Cosplay With Confidence, at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday. “Since doing those, there have been so many other panels where other people have been inspired to share that same message. And because of that, you see a lot more acceptance in the community.”

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Gardner, a relative newcomer to cosplay, who so far has only dressed as Rey, the strong female character introduced to the Star Wars universe in “The Force Awakens,” says it’s important for the conventions, like society at large, to continue working toward equality and fair play for all for “as long as we have this very toxic, very sexist attitude toward women in nerd culture.

“This is actually a very powerful way to bond,” she says of cosplay. “It’s really just upsetting that the way society views women and treats people in general creeps into these communities and makes them toxic. Because at its heart, it’s very pure.”